Zoe Rahman, Melting Pot

Most widely heard on the UK scene as the pianist in Clark Tracey's hard-bop band, Zoe Rahman (a former Perrier Young Jazz Musician of the Year and a student of the eccentrically gifted American pianist Joanne Brackeen) alerted audiences to her independent musical life with a 2001 album, The Cynic. Like that set, this one is mostly built around a trio (this time the vigorous expat American drummer Gene Calderazzo and bassist Oli Hayhurst on all but one track), with Rahman's wayward and mobile left-hand patterns swerving under crisp postbop swingers like Camel, soft meditations with repeating low themes emerging under treble trills (Shiraz), dense, hypnotic, multilinear entanglements like the funky The Calling or free-jazz tussles preceding soft rumination like No-One.